Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
philipp-gayret | on: Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?
The atrophy of manually writing code is certainly real. I'd compare it to using a paper map and a compass to navigate, versus say Google Maps. I don't particularly care to lose the skill, even though being good and enjoying the programming part of making software was my main source of income for more than a decade. I just can't escape being significantly faster with a Claude Code.

> he can tell what it generates is messy for long-term maintenance, even if it does work and even though he's new to React.

When one can generate code in such a short amount of time, logically it is not hard to maintain. You could just re-generate it if you didn't like it. I don't believe this style of argument where it's easy to generate with AI but then you cannot maintain it after. It does not hold up logically, and I have yet to see such a codebase where AI was able to generate it, but now cannot maintain it. What I have seen this year is feature-complete language and framework rewrites done by AI with these new tools. For me the unmaintainable code claim is difficult to believe.

0x6d61646f | parent | next
have you tried using AI generated code in a non hobby project? one that has to go to production?

it just allucinates packages, adds random functions that already exist, creates new random APIs.

How is that not unmantainable?

loading story #47393327
loading story #47396104
loading story #47393727
anonzzzies | root | parent | next
We use it for 100s of projects and what you say hasn't happened for a while.
loading story #47394244
yojo | parent
LLMs rarely if ever proactively identify cleanup refactors that reduce the complexity of a codebase. They do, however, still happily duplicate logic or large blocks of markup, defer imports rather than fixing dependency cycles, introduce new abstractions for minimal logic, and freely accumulate a plethora of little papercuts and speed bumps.

These same LLMs will then get lost in the intricacies of the maze they created on subsequent tasks, until they are unable to make forward progress without introducing regressions.

You can at this point ask the LLM to rewrite the rat’s nest, and it will likely produce new code that is slightly less horrible but introduces its own crop of new bugs.

All of this is avoidable, if you take the wheel and steer the thing a little. But all the evidence I’ve seen is that it’s not ready for full automation, unless your user base has a high tolerance for bugs.

I understand Anthropic builds Claude Code without looking at the code. And I encounter new bugs, some of them quite obvious and bad, every single day. A Claude process starts at 200MB of RAM and grows from there, for a CLI tool that is just a bundle of file tools glued to a wrapper around an API!

I think they have a rats nest over there, but they’re the only game in town so I have to live with this nonsense.